everblack
English
[edit]Etymology 1
[edit]Noun
[edit]everblack (plural everblacks)
- (informal) An evergreen tree that has very dark, colorless leaves or needles.
- 1881, Gardeners Chronicle & New Horticulturist, page 820:
- A visit to the Parks, to the Embankment gardens, or the smokiest of the suburbs, reveals the fact that among evergreens—evergreens by courtesy, everblacks in reality—those which have the thickest, glossiest leaves are, other things being equal, least affected.
- 1894, Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute - Volume 14, page 20:
- Vegetation of all kinds is scanty in the central parts of London, and evergreens merely degenerate into everblacks and die.
- 1968, New American Review, page 225:
- For the Trolls and the Orcs, this was an irreversible descent, into a moral climate of all winter and a montonous landscape of everblacks.
- 2003, Jessica Mordsley, Ghosts of the Old Year: New Welsh Short Fiction, page 32:
- A grey lid is bolted down to the mountaintops, arching from the forest of everblack trees on one slope to the everblack trees on the other.
- 2012, David Fletcher, Ticklers, →ISBN:
- And then its poor old vegetation didn't help much either. It was mostly of the everblack coniferous variety, lacking colour even in its fruits and flowers.
Etymology 2
[edit]Noun
[edit]everblack (uncountable)
- A desolate environment without any source of light, such as that found in deep space.
- 1991, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction - Volume 81, page 109:
- But here in the everblack, where natural laws were the only ones that mattered, he belonged to the cosmos — which could not be bought off or influenced, and which would take him back into itself in OH, MIRANDA!
- 1995, Greg Delanty, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Jumping off shadows: selected contemporary Irish poets, page 257:
- don't go there/ but keep your heart beating/ still a while/ don't leave me in the everblack /blacker than dark without you
- 2011, George Zebrowski, Cave of Stars: Macrolife, →ISBN:
- He became dust, but was still conscious, enduring as the stars finally aged and new ones were born, and he became part of the unfeeling everblack, then nothing.